India's "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model Targets Pakistan

by Riaz Haq

Dec 28, 2020

India with its massive disinformation campaign against Pakistan, as recently revealed by EU Disinfo Lab, appears to be following what a US think tank RAND calls "Firehose of Falsehood" propaganda model. It has over 750 fake media outlets covering 119 countries. There are over 750 domain names, some in the name of dead people and others using stolen identities. Pakistani policymakers charged with countering the Indian propaganda should read the RAND report "Firehose of Falsehoods" for its 5 specific recommendations to the US government to effectively respond to the Russian disinformation campaign. In particular they should heed its key advice: "All other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive.......Don't expect to counter Russia's firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth. Instead, put raincoats on those at whom the firehose is aimed" 

Scale and Duration of India's Campaign:

EU Disinfo Lab, an NGO that specializes in disinformation campaigns, has found that India is carrying out a massive 15-year-long disinformation campaign to hurt Pakistan. The key objective of the Indian campaign as reported in "Indian Chronicles" is as follows: "The creation of fake media in Brussels, Geneva and across the world and/or the repackaging and dissemination via ANI and obscure local media networks – at least in 97 countries – to multiply the repetition of online negative content about countries in conflict with India, in particular Pakistan".  After the disclosure of India's anti-Pakistan propaganda campaign, Washington-based US analyst Michael Kugelman tweeted: "The scale and duration of the EU/UN-centered Indian disinformation campaign exposed by @DisinfoEU is staggering. Imagine how the world would be reacting if this were, say, a Russian or Chinese operation".  

American Analyst Michael Kugelman's Tweet on Indian Disinformation Campaign

Firehose of Falsehood:

What Kugelman calls "Russian Operation" appears to be a reference to a US government-funded think tank RAND Corporation's report entitled "The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model". Here is an excerpt of the RAND report:

"Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. This propaganda includes text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via the Internet, social media, satellite television, and traditional radio and television broadcasting. The producers and disseminators include a substantial force of paid Internet “trolls” who also often attack or undermine views or information that runs counter to Russian themes, doing so through online chat rooms, discussion forums, and comments sections on news and other websites".

EU Disinformation Lab Report on India's Disinformation Campaign Against Pakistan

Indian Political Unity Against Pakistan:  

Former US President Barack Obama has observed that “Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity (in India)”.  The Indian disinformation campaign is a manifestation of Indians' political unity against Pakistan.  EU Disinfo Lab has found that Indian Chronicles is a 15-year-long campaign that started in 2005 on former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's watch, well before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's election to India's highest office in 2014. It has grown to over 750 fake media outlets covering 119 countries. There are over 750 domain names, some in the name of dead people and others using stolen identities.  Here is an excerpt of EU Disinfo Lab's report:

"The creation of fake media in Brussels, Geneva and across the world and/or the repackaging and dissemination via ANI and obscure local media networks – at least in 97 countries – to multiply the repetition of online negative content about countries in conflict with India, in particular Pakistan". 

RAND's Recipe:  
Traditional countermeasures are ineffective against "firehose of falsehoods" propaganda techniques. As researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Mathews of RAND put it: "Don't expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth." They suggest:
1. Repeating the counter-information 
2. Providing an alternative story to fill in the gaps created when false "facts" are removed 
2. Forewarning people about propaganda, highlighting the ways propagandists manipulate public opinion. 
3.  Countering the effects of propaganda, rather than the propaganda itself; for example, to counter propaganda that undermines support for a cause, work to boost support for that cause rather than refuting the propaganda directly 
5. Turning off the flow by enlisting the aid of Internet service providers and social media services, and conducting electronic warfare and cyberspace operation
Summary: 
India with its massive disinformation campaign against Pakistan appears to be following what a US think tank RAND calls "Firehose of Falsehoods". Pakistani policymakers charged with countering the Indian propaganda should read the RAND report "Firehose of Falsehoods" for its 5 specific recommendations to the US government to effectively respond to the Russian disinformation campaign. In particular they should heed its key advice: "All other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive.......Don't expect to counter Russia's firehose of falsehoods with the squirt gun of truth. Instead, put raincoats on those at whom the firehose is aimed" 
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  • Riaz Haq

    Pakistani student uses AI to combat propaganda on social media

    https://mmnews.tv/pakistani-student-uses-ai-to-combat-propaganda-on...


    Muhammad Umar, A Pakistani student at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), has made a significant contribution in detecting propaganda on social media platforms, especially in cases where there is a mixture of low and high-resource languages.

    Umar, who is from Pakistan and speaks Urdu as his first language, is one of many people who are contributing to the large amounts of research and time being spent on languages other than English for preservation, education, and language modelling.

    Umar, who holds a Master of Science in natural language processing (NLP), is aware of the influence that language has on public conversation and the way that opinions are formed.

    “Propaganda is a pervasive tool used to manipulate public opinion, and it is a growing concern in the digital age, especially in bilingual communities where little to no work has been done to detect it. Most propaganda detection work has been done on high-resource languages, such as English, leaving low-resource languages largely unexplored,” said Umar, who is part of the university’s first cohort of NLP graduates.

    Umar noted that code-switching, which involves mixing multiple languages in the same text, is common in low-resource language communities and can make propaganda detection more challenging.

    “In linguistics, code-switching refers to the practice of alternating between two or more languages or language varieties in a single conversation or text. In the context of my thesis, code-switched social media text specifically refers to social media text that uses a mixture of different languages, including English and Roman Urdu.”

    Despite graduating, Umar is continuing his research and hopes to submit a paper related to detecting propaganda techniques in code-switched text at the 2023 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference, one of the primary high impact NLP and artificial intelligence conferences for NLP research.

    Jul 6, 2023

  • Riaz Haq

    Meta’s India team delayed action against Army-led misinformation operation in Kashmir: Washington Post - The Hindu



    https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/metas-india-team-delayed-act...

    Facebook parent Meta’s Indian team delayed action against an organised propaganda and misinformation operation led by the Indian Army’s Chinar Corps in Jammu and Kashmir for a year, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing former employees at the company. According to the report, Army officials met representatives of Twitter and Facebook and defended the operation as a counter against Pakistani misinformation networks.

    The report cited members of Meta’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) team for Facebook, whose brief was to flag fake profiles and networks of accounts that artificially amplified messages on the social network around the world. When the CIB flagged the Chinar Corps’s alleged operation, Meta staff in India reportedly “warned against antagonising the government of a sovereign nation over actions in territory it controls,” and expressed concern that local employees “could be imprisoned for treason,” the Post reported.

    Disinformation campaign
    It is unclear what the Chinar Corps’ network was posting, but the report cites “disinformation that put Kashmiri journalists in danger,” adding that many CIB employees at Facebook quit the company after Indian Meta staff stymied any pushback. The operation reportedly targeted Srinagar-based media outlet The Kashmiriyat and its editor Qazi Shibli. The Hindu has reached out to Army representatives for comment.

    “As a global company, we operate in an increasingly complex regulatory environment and are focused on keeping people safe when they use our services and ensuring the safety of our employees in a manner consistent with applicable laws and human rights principles,” Meta said in a statement shared with The Hindu, adding that it prohibited coordinated inauthentic behaviour on its platforms.



    This is not the first time the social media firm has been accused of allowing propaganda networks in India to go unchecked. In 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that posts by Telangana BJP MLA T. Raja Singh calling for violence against Rohingya immigrants from Myanmar were not taken down, in spite of warnings from Meta staff in the U.S., due to pushback from Ankhi Das, Mr. Thukral’s predecessor.

    Sep 27, 2023

  • Riaz Haq

    Dr. Audrey Truschke
    @AudreyTruschke
    Disinfo Labs — a group that promotes far-right Hindutva conspiracy theories against critics of the Modi government — is an Indian intelligence operation, WaPo reports.

    Some thoughts on why this matters —

    https://x.com/AudreyTruschke/status/1734210988625305897?s=20

    -------------------

    EU DisinfoLab
    @DisinfoEU
    Many of you read
    @wapo
    ’s investigation and we want to reiterate that there's no association between us and 'The DisinfoLab', an Indian entity.

    @gerryshih
    revealed their connections to Indian Intelligence and a deliberate use of our name to leverage our established credibility.

    https://x.com/DisinfoEU/status/1734220723764236601?s=20

    ---------------

    Covert Indian operation seeks to discredit Modi’s critics in the U.S. - The Washington Post

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/10/india-the-disinfo-l...

    The Disinfo Lab, which at one point consisted of about a dozen private contractors working out of a four-story whitewashed building on a leafy street in New Delhi, was created in mid-2020 by Lt. Col. Dibya Satpathy, now 39, an intelligence officer who has worked to shape international perceptions of India, said the three people familiar with the operation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence activities.

    Satpathy was initially commissioned as an infantry officer and served in the army’s intelligence and public information units, said a person briefed on his military personnel record. That person and another source close to the military said Satpathy was later detailed to his current posting with India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). Over the years, Satpathy has introduced himself to Western journalists and commentators under fake identities — including his preferred alias, Shakti, meaning “power” in Hindi — and sought favorable coverage of India or critical coverage of its adversaries, Pakistan and China, according to five additional people who have had contact with Satpathy.

    Dec 11, 2023